Set in 2025, when white men are still called "honkeys" and people still ask if you can "dig it," this story follows Ben Richards, an out of work revolutionary whose wife is a prostitute and whose 18-month-old baby is dying from pneumonia. Desperately needing money to buy medicine for the little tyke, Richards applies as a contestant for a popular game show called "The Running Man." The show is a way of ridding society of some of its more undesirable elements. Contestants are given a 12-hour head start, then pursued by merciless Hunters. Every hour they stay alive nets them a hundred bucks, which in this society is a lot of dough. It's unclear how or why "The Running Man" is a popular show. Though frowned upon, it isn't against the rules for the runner to take out innocent bystanders. Killing a cop is worth another hundred bucks. King, mired in the late sixties/early seventies, takes the hippie hatred of cops to a new level: everyone hates them, deriving entertainment from their deaths. Why anyone would want to be a cop in this society is another matter. The whole milieu is contradictory and self-serving. This is a race for Ben's life (and the life of his daughter); it should be exciting. However, like Rage, his first Bachman book, King substitutes an amorphous anger for anything truly stirring. That might work for teenagers, but adults can see through it all too easily. It all leads to a comic book ending, with lots of blood and wet, hanging entrails. If that's your thing, you may get a kick out of it. Made into a much more entertaining movie in 1987, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Richard Dawson.

I watched the movie before I read the book and while the movie was everything I expected from an "Ahnold" movie, the book was much different. Ben in the book had a grudge to settle while the movie guy had a mission to "set people free".

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Brian

1/18/2017 07:03:02 am

But the grudge was part of the problem, seeing as how King's future world was self-contradictory and silly. Just anger for the sake of anger. And as for the movie, what sets it apart, I think, from just another "Arnold movie" is Richard Dawson. You could have plugged any action star into Arnold's role, but not many people could have pulled off the game show host like Dawson does.